Every athlete on Elite Academy takes the same physical assessment battery every 12 weeks. Ten tests across four categories — movement competency, joint range, lower-limb power, and strength endurance — built by our physical-performance partner Athletix to identify the biggest injury risks and the biggest performance ceilings for a fast bowler or batter. Read this guide once, then film in about 45 minutes at home. A head-of-strength reviews every submission personally.
Nothing here is arbitrary. Each of the four categories captures a distinct dimension of the athlete — leave a hole in any one and the others eventually collapse under load. Together they tell a coach where you are, where you're most at risk, and what to work on this block.
Can you move the way a heavy-load session will demand of you? Squat and hinge patterns — the two shapes that decide whether the strength work later will build you or hurt you.
Ankle mobility. Restricted here quietly reroutes force upstream to the knee, hip and back — where fast bowlers get hurt.
Horizontal power, bilateral and single-leg. Correlates directly with sprint speed, delivery-stride force, and batting foot movement. Also surfaces left-right asymmetry — the single strongest injury predictor we have.
Strength endurance — trunk, upper body, single-leg. Whether the tenth over of your spell looks like the first. And whether the non-dominant side of your body is keeping up with the dominant one.
Read once end-to-end before your first assessment. After that, jump straight to whichever test you're about to film.
A well-prepared 45-minute window at home gives us cleaner data than half-attempts spread across two weeks. Get the space, kit, and warm-up right, then work through the battery.
10-minute low-intensity warm-up before you film anything. Bike, jog, or the FBU dynamic warm-up if you have it.
Do the tests in the order below — power and jumps first while you're fresh, capacity tests last when fatigue no longer matters:
The two shapes every lower-body strength session moves through. Coaches score competent or not-yet-competent — no numbers. Fail these and we prioritise coaching the shape before adding load anywhere else.
Whether you can move through the foundational lower-body strength pattern with the shape, depth and control needed to safely accept load later. This is a pattern-quality check, not a strength check.
Every squat, deadlift, split-squat, jump and delivery stride borrows this shape. A poor squat pattern under load isn't a strength problem, it's an injury pipeline — usually knees, sometimes lower back. We fix the shape first and add load second.
The hip-hinge pattern — bending forward from the hips (not the lower back) while keeping the spine long. It's the safe way to load the posterior chain.
Bowling and batting both demand a strong posterior chain. The RDL is how we develop it. Athletes who can't hinge without rounding their back are one heavy training session away from a lumbar injury — this is the test that flags them.
One test. Ankle dorsiflexion — the joint most likely to force compensation upstream if it's restricted. Measure both sides; asymmetry matters as much as the absolute number.
How much your ankle can bend forward (dorsiflex) with your heel staying on the ground — measured as the distance from your big toe to the wall when your knee just touches the wall.
Restricted ankle dorsiflexion is one of the quietest injury predictors we track. Bowlers with limited ankle range shift force upstream to the knee, hip and lower back with every delivery. Batters with restricted ankles struggle to get into low positions square of the wicket. It also directly restricts squat depth — so all the strength work on top ends up limited by an inch of ankle.
Left/right asymmetry > 2 cm is worth flagging — the restricted side compensates during single-leg loading.
Two jump tests — bilateral for absolute power, single-leg for asymmetry. Do these fresh, before any capacity work. Wear shoes.
Maximum horizontal power your legs can generate from a standing start. Distance covered in a two-footed jump from stationary.
Correlates strongly with sprint acceleration, bowling delivery-stride force, and batting foot movement. It's the most robust and repeatable field measure of lower-body power we have — no equipment beyond a tape measure, no interpretation required.
Junior and female athletes: your coach will hold your score against age-and-gender norms rather than these adult-male ranges.
Total distance covered in three consecutive hops on the same leg, sticking the third landing. Done per side. The critical output is the left/right asymmetry, not the absolute number.
Cricket is an asymmetric sport. A right-arm bowler lands hard on a braced left leg every ball; a right-handed batter drives off the front foot into the ball. Asymmetries in single-leg power are the strongest injury predictor we have — a > 10% side-to-side deficit dramatically raises stress-fracture risk on the weaker side and caps pace/power on the stronger side.
(larger − smaller) ÷ larger × 100. Anything above 10% is flagged as a priority to address. Absolute rough bands for a senior male athlete:
Five tests. Trunk, upper body, single-leg. The measures that tell us whether your body holds up when the game gets long — deep into a bowling spell, batting a long innings, or the tenth over of a T20.
How long you can hold a strict prone plank with correct body position. Anterior trunk endurance under body-weight.
Trunk endurance is the load-bearing structure that keeps a bowler's action repeatable and a batter stable through long innings. Weak anterior trunk endurance is directly linked to lumbar stress reactions in fast bowlers — one of the most common and season-ending injuries in the sport.
Lateral trunk endurance per side. How long you can hold a strict side plank with proper hip elevation and body line.
Fast bowling loads one side of the trunk heavily — the contralateral side to the bowling arm. Left/right asymmetry in lateral core endurance is a strong stress-fracture predictor. This test surfaces it directly.
Left/right asymmetry > 20% is a red flag — coach will prescribe extra work on the weaker side.
Upper-body pushing endurance at a controlled tempo. The metronome eliminates the "grind out fast partial reps" cheat and captures true strength endurance.
Correlates with shoulder-girdle stability, thoracic-spine control, and repeat-effort capacity — all of which decay across a long bowling spell or a batting innings. Also a fair proxy for pushing strength relative to body weight.
Unilateral lower-limb strength endurance — how many times you can stand up entirely on one leg from a standard chair.
Second asymmetry test in the battery — this one focuses on strength rather than power. Together with the 3-Hop test, it gives us a two-dimensional read on which side of your body is under-developed. Predicts risk of contralateral-limb overload injuries in bowlers.
L/R asymmetry > 20% is flagged — commonly indicates a compensatory pattern from a previous injury.
Relative upper-body pulling strength — how many strict unbroken pull-ups you can perform. Body-weight is the load, so heavier athletes have more work to do.
For bowlers, upper-back and thoracic-spine strength is what holds the delivery shape together through a spell. For batters, grip strength and back development underpin bat speed and control. A strong pulling-strength baseline predicts durability of both.
Can't do a full pull-up yet? That's fine — record 0 and note it in the athlete comments. The block after your assessment will include a pull-up progression (band-assisted, negatives) to build toward the first rep.
Once you submit your assessment via the portal, a head-of-strength reviews every video and score personally. Within 5 business days you receive a written report covering competency verdicts, absolute scores against age-and-gender norms, asymmetry flags, priority focus areas, and a training block tailored to those priorities that lands in your training diary automatically.
You get quarterly assessment + written report + integrated training plan as part of your $400/month subscription. If you're not sure whether Elite is right for you, start with a $149 Review & Plan — one video, one three-point plan, credit toward Academy if you upgrade within 30 days.
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